


The Good in Me

by LydeNicoKITE



Series: no feeling is final (short stories) -2020 [5]
Category: The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: Andy is dead, Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Canon Compliant, Family Feels, Found Family, Grief/Mourning, Hopeful Ending, Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani and Nicky | Nicolò di Genova are in Love, M/M, Nicky stops healing, Post-Canon, Team as Family, new immortals make a brief appearance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-26
Updated: 2020-12-26
Packaged: 2021-03-11 02:01:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,354
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28337397
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LydeNicoKITE/pseuds/LydeNicoKITE
Summary: Nile is sombre when she says: “If that’s what you want.”Her words may seem cold, but Joe knows she is just shocked, trying to deal with the news. Her voice doesn’t falter. She’s their boss, after all.“Fuck, guys,” Booker is smiling. His eyes are full of tears, but Joe holds onto that smile. It’s been a long time since the Merrick betrayal. Booker is better, and he is trying to smile for them, for Joe, whose heart is breaking. It’s not a true smile, but it means a lot.“It’s the right thing to do.”Joe turns to look at the sofa, where Quỳnh is knitting a scarf, her mouth is a thin line. There is a tightness around her eyes which comes back every time she is thinking about Andy and gets sad. The moments of complete sadness, when Quỳnh acts like she sees the ghost of her wife in front of her, have decreased across the decades. But now everything is coming back, as if Andy died all over again.Because Nicky isn’t healing. And Joe knows they need to leave.
Relationships: Booker | Sebastien le Livre & Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani, Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani/Nicky | Nicolò di Genova, Nile Freeman & Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani & Nicky | Nicolo di Genova & Quynh, Quynh | Noriko & Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani
Series: no feeling is final (short stories) -2020 [5]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1839736
Comments: 17
Kudos: 152





	The Good in Me

**Author's Note:**

> I swear this has a happy/hopeful ending. As always, you can find this and other fics on tumblr, I'm @nicolodigenovas.  
> The title comes from a very Kaysanova song by Jon Bellion, and that means this is a bit for Kayla, who sends me the best songs. Thank you to all the lovely people who always leave comments, you make my day brighter.

### The Good in Me

Nile is sombre when she says: “If that’s what you want.”

Her words may seem cold, but Joe knows she is just shocked, trying to deal with the news. Her voice doesn’t falter. She’s their boss, after all.

“Fuck, guys,” Booker is smiling. His eyes are full of tears, but Joe holds onto that smile. It’s been a long time since the Merrick betrayal. Booker is better, and he is trying to smile for them, for Joe, whose heart is breaking. It’s not a true smile, but it means a lot.

“It’s the right thing to do.”

Joe turns to look at the sofa, where Quỳnh is knitting a scarf, her mouth is a thin line. There is a tightness around her eyes which comes back every time she is thinking about Andy and gets sad. The moments of complete sadness, when Quỳnh acts like she sees the ghost of her wife in front of her, have decreased across the decades. But now everything is coming back, as if Andy died all over again.

Because Nicky isn’t healing. And Joe knows they need to leave.

_We are retiring, so that Nicky can have as much time as possible._

_Now?_

_I can’t lose time. I need every hour, every minute, every year I’ll have with Nicky even if he’s aging and I am not. (_ Joe smiled _.) I already checked._

Quỳnh keeps knitting even if she feels Joe’s eyes on her. She’s his oldest friend, now, and Joe needs her reassurance like air.

“Andy didn’t want to stop fighting, after she stopped healing and I came back,” Quỳnh murmurs, even if they all know, even the two new immortals, who are looking at Joe with the lost look of kids getting separated from their parents. (They’re good kids, and they listen to Nile. _They’ll be fine_ , Joe thinks, prays. He loves his family, new and old.)

“I wanted her to stop,” Quỳnh confesses. “I wanted peace. But I also knew Andy needed to keep going for a while, fighting the good fight. She didn’t believe she ever deserved to live for so long. Sometimes I think she felt like she owed the world something she couldn’t give,” her voice breaks “even if she gave it everything. It’s the world that never deserved her. So when she stopped fighting, and we retired, because Andy was tired... I was happy. I was happy that she couldn’t lift her axe anymore. Because I needed that peace with her to be able to let her go when the moment came.”

Quỳnh looks at him and Joe doesn’t hide the tears. He hopes she can read in his eyes how much he loves her.

“It’s the right choice. Now go get Nicky.”

•

They got lucky. A bullet hit Nicky in the shoulder and he healed, it was the knife that took away his immortality. He has bandages on his face. Joe realises he can’t imagine his Nicky ever changing, even if he has proof under his fingers, brushing Nicky’s cheek with a featherlight touch.

Nicky told him it’s poetic that he probably lost an eye, because it’s the first wound Joe ever did to him.

Joe cries as soon as Nicky falls asleep.

•

Nicky’s face heals slowly. Joe’s heart heals slowly as well, because every time he _realises_ — that Nicky is going to die, that he is aging in front of his eyes while Joe doesn’t change— it breaks again.

They move to five different countries in the span of two years, feeling restless. Italy doesn’t feel right, Malta spits them out after a three month holiday. They both keep track of the others, of their missions and evolutions —Jin is the sniper now and Nicky is bursting with pride—, but they never partecipate in the decision making. They slowly but surely drift away from the mercenary life, and they partially lose their family in the process. It hurts, but it’s the right choice.

Booker is the one who visits the most. Nile calls them often, pretending she needs their council when she just wants to hear Nicky’s laugh and Joe’s anecdotes. Quỳnh buys —steals— them souvenirs.

Nicky’s laughing more after the second year, Joe realises, but he is not sure if it’s always genuine. He’s always trying very hard to make things easier for Joe, as if Joe is the one who is mortal. (One night, Nicky thinks Joe’s asleep and confesses: “I wish you were the one who left first. I don’t want to leave you alone.”)

Nicky works as a nurse and he is —not surprisingly— good at it, every day he is his kind and thoughtful and competent self. Joe struggles to reconcile with every little thing that changes, like the ugly scar on Nicky’s face, the burn on Nicky’s hand he gets one night while cooking, the thinnest lines appearing on his love’s face. When he listens to Nicky talking about his day at the hospital, however, he realises that Nicky is still with him in every way that matters. It’s Nicolò as he’s always been, mostly kind, always brave.

They still make love with laughter and playful teasing every first night in a new flat. Joe sucks Nicky off in the kitchen of a nice little house in Lisboa so well that they hear the neighbours grumbling for the noise.

“We should...” Nicky smiles at Joe, his hair everywhere. “We should stay here. Ten out of ten. Best view.”

Joe laughs, but they do end up staying. _It’s not forever_ , Nicky tells him, _we can always move_.

But Joe doesn’t have an answer for that. His heart is breaking again. _It’s not forever. We are on borrowed time._

Joe works as a teacher for a year, then he goes back to painting and even manages to sell a few paintings —not because he lacks clients, but because he is reticent to separate from art that encapsulates happy memories. He almost decides to open an antiques shop, especially when he finds out that he still loves haggling and the thrill of a deal gone well, but Nicky tells him they’re not in a rush. Joe has time to choose how to spend their last decades.

Joe spends a good portion of his time writing. He writes of a thousand little things, most of them composing a portrait of Nicky that is more accurate than a painting. He breaks their life together in different notebooks that add up on his desk, like a little pending tower of Pisa. Nicky jokes that Joe could publish them, in a tone that means he is actually considering the idea.

They exchange a look over the table, then look at the notebooks.

Nicky becomes his first editor. They read out loud passages and reenact their best moments like in a play, Nicky brandishing a wooden spoon like his longsword. Joe laughs shaking with his entire body, Nicky ends up crying and laughing so hard he can’t finish reading the page. (He’s wearing a dirty rag on his head to represent his mullet phase.)

There are so many good moments. More than enough to balance the bad ones.

“Hey,” Nicky tells him when Joe gets lost in his own head, anxiety crawling on his skin impossible to shake. “We’re not ending yet. Stay in the present with me.”

It works for the first five minutes, a moment of relief where Joe thinks: “We can do this.” Soon after Joe welcomes back his nightmares and dark thoughts, and Nicky knows he can’t do anything but hold him. Nicky could never take away the darkness in his mind, but he always made the road a little brighter.

They don’t realise how lonely they have been until the entire group visits. 

It hits Joe, that Andy isn’t the first one to come in when he opens the door. It hurts like hell. Quỳnh looks at him like she knows exactly what he’s thinking, but they don’t talk about it. There is no need. Andy is with them in the way Joe hugs Nile and lifts her up from the ground, in the way Nicky prepared food she would have loved. 

One day, Joe thinks, they will all speak in anything but English as a way to remember Nicky, and there will be teary smiles. Nicky will be a ghost like Andy, another invisible hand that keeps them all together, in grief and life. There is a legacy of love holding the group together that is maybe stronger than the duty they have to the world. 

They eat together and enjoy how Nile tells the new stories they haven’t been a part of, how Booker almost got himself killed by a rooster. (”It was a vicious rooster.” “Sure, love.”)

“Nicky, pass me the potatoes,” says Jin, cheeks filled with food. He has the perennial appetite of a twenty-year old, and Nicky always fed him like a proud grandma. 

Nicky surprises everyone, himself included, when he looks at Jin and the rest of the group and says: “I missed you,” , then starts crying. 

“I didn’t realise how much I’d missed them,” Nicky murmurs, tears falling on Joe’s shirt as he holds him. “I am scared. I don’t want to leave you,” he adds in a small broken voice.

Joe closes his eyes shut and counts to ten, twenty, forty until he is sure he won’t cry.

“I know.”

•

They reach a balance. The group officially visits once a year, but when the immortals split up after a mission one of them usually ends up knocking at their door. Nicky keeps a closet full of weapons for any occasion. Their house, wherever they are, becomes the most requested safe house. 

“The kids call it the grandpas safe house,” Booker confesses, eyes alive with laughter. Joe likes the name immensely. 

Joe sees Nicky’s first grey hair. Then their world shifts again on its axis, and Joe learns how to breathe again.

•

It happens while Nile is visiting. The group forgets that even if their secret is safe, they still live a life of war; they visit the grandpas safe house one too many times until someone decides to put some holes in the walls.

Joe understands something is wrong before Nile does. Nicky is too busy cooking to notice, but the open window in the building in front of them is unusual, Nile has told them about some other mercenaries who have crossed paths with them. In the split second before the shooting starts, Joe drags Nicky down, leaving Nile under the rain of bullets.

She gasps awake a few moments later, her blood staining the floor with the rubble and dust.

“Nicky, Nicky!” She panics, but Nicky is fine, just shocked. It takes them a split second before instincts and a millennium of experience kick in. Nicky’s eyes are cold when he goes for the weapons cupboard. Joe realises he didn’t miss the fighting, the violence and how it changes them, but he knows there’s no use asking Nicky to step back.

They fight like the old times, using Andy strategies to keep Nicky safe. It is a dance they’ve never forgotten, Nicky and Joe existing in the same space in perfect harmony. Dodge, hit, kill, protect, kill, hit, hide. This is who they are, no, who they were. It is a skin they’ve shed since Nicky stopped healing. It is—

Joe gets hit and doesn’t heal.

•

He wakes up in pain. It is a dull kind of pain, but it doesn’t fade after a few minutes. Realising the pain in his abdomen isn’t going away, Joe panics, eyes wide. He is in a room he doesn’t know, white walls and dim lights, but the cold hands on him are familiar.

“Don’t move,” Nicky says. “I’m here.”

“I’m not—” Joe struggles with breath.

“Kamala stitched you up,” Nicky murmurs. “You scared us. I almost lost you.”

“I am not healing.”

“Don’t smile, you idiot. You almost died.”

“But Nicky,” Joe’s head is filled with cotton, everything hurts a bit, but he has the inescapable urge to laugh. “Nicky, we’ll grow old together.”

Nicky’s eyes are shining with tears. It is a rare, beautiful sight.

“We have the same age now. I gained three years.”

“I can still order you around. Sources tell me you’re whipped for me.”

“ _Sources_ ,” Nicky snorts. “Trustworthy informants saying Nicolò di Genova can’t wait to spend the rest of his life with you.”

“Nicolò Al-Kaysani.”

Nicky’s smile is blinding.

“Of course. It sounds so much better.”

“Nicolò Al-Kaysani,” Joe whispers again, his head is getting heavy. “Best husband in the wor—”

He falls asleep mid-word, mouth open.

Nicky stays in the room for a while, head resting on the bed near Joe. He hears soft voices coming from the first floor, Nile scolding Jin and Kamala winning against Booker and Quỳnh at poker. Nile’s laugh reaches their quiet room, after a century it hasn’t changed a bit.

In a moment, Nicky will go downstairs, where Booker will hug him and tell him they have always been the luckiest idiots in the universe. Quỳnh will probably kiss him on the cheek and they will have an entire conversation in silence, until Nicky will raise a single eyebrow in a way he is sure will make her laugh. Nile will scold Jin again, but then Jin will ask Nicky to help him cook and she won’t be able to stay angry at him anymore. Kamala will go check up on Joe during dinner, because she has always liked Joe the best —who can blame her, really.

It will be another beginning, a soft coda. But for now, Nicky holds Joe’s hand, marvels at how lucky they are. They can rest, now.

Jin’s shriek meets the unmistakable sound of broken ceramics. Booker screams, Nile calls his name with an edge of laughter and panic.

“NICKY! WE NEED YOU!”

Nicky stands up, kisses Joe’s forehead. Booker calls his name again.

He slowly closes the door, leaving it ajar. After sparing one last look behind him, he runs down the stairs to meet the others.


End file.
